I've been trying to write these retrospectives, both for my own tracking and to serve everyone else. Please let me know if you're finding them useful?
The agenda for the meeting is over here.
The Committee met in executive session before public session for discussions on five of the contract negotiations currently being conducted.
We also did this:
Congratulations to our Business Team for receiving the Association of Business Officers International Meritorious AGAIN! Yes they have received this award 10 years in a row!!! 😀 #excellence #allmeansall @worcesterpublic pic.twitter.com/NF4GjiaCfu
— Rachel H. Monárrez, PhD (she/her/ella) (@drrmonarrez) January 20, 2023
And because this really is that important, here's what I said about that:
Paul Matthews, the Executive Director of the Worcester Regional Research Bureau, spoke briefly on the WRRB's recent report on the evolution in School Committee governance. He also highlighted the Bureau's interactive dashboard on the new school committee districts.
From the held items, we received some additional information about the outside mental health resources coming into the district. That looks like this:
The report of the superintendent was on the multilingual department, the department that oversees language acquisition. What I think is important to remember about English learner enrollment is that it is a point in time count; students are continually moving through that status, as they test out. So while about a third of our students are English learners at any one time, what is perhaps a more useful statistic is that nearly 60% of our students speak a first language other than English. In other words, this is most of our students.
Let me also call attention to two slides from that report. First, this is the students we're talking about here:
And just to be clear: those contracts do not come back to us, as that isn't under our purview.
Why? Under the rules of the Worcester School Committee, any member (and it is ANY member, regardless of how they voted) can file for reconsideration (think of it as "wanting to vote that again" with the assumption being voting differently) of any vote we took up to 48 business hours after the meeting. That means that any of us have until the end of the day Monday to file after every meeting. Reconsideration can only be done once on every vote.
As a result, votes of the Worcester School Committee aren't actionable until Tuesday morning. If we want something to take effect immediately, we basically tie our own hands by voting reconsideration at the meeting. We have to suspend our own rules to do that (those are "yes, I want to suspend the rules" votes) and then vote on reconsideration (thus we vote "no, I do not want to reconsider the vote we already took"). We did this on Burncoat, so it could be taken up by the City Clerk on Friday to be posted for the Council's Tuesday's agenda.
The second and third items were taken together; they were:
To review the steps of accessing accommodation services for students on IEP per the Individual and disability education Act (IDEA) and the roles that administration and parent/guardians.
(that should be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and:
To review the process of students needing accommodation for extra time for exams or tests.
Let me just be super clear: these are well within the realm of things School Committee members and others might want to know about. As I said at the meeting, this might be something to take up at a SPEDPAC meeting, for example.
What they aren't is under School Committee purview; these are not things on which we have any ability or legal right to take action. They also don't lead to anything about which we can take action. This thus isn't the business of the School Committee.
As our rules say, "Agenda items filed by School Committee members shall be under the purview of the Committee, focus on the business of the Committee, and should be concise and specific."(That's the beginning of Rule 25)
Something different happened with Member Mailman's item, which read, "To resume public reporting of health data and absences while COVID is still prevalent in the city." You might remember we'd been getting COVID information at every meeting; that ended, on a split vote on a motion from Vice Chair Johnson, at our December 15 meeting. However, a motion from Member Clancey, asking that the information still be shared, passed. That less than clear to us (or at least it was to me). After Dr. Monárrez explained how the information was being shared both with the committee and on the website, the motion was filed.
Next meeting on February 2!
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